Where Is the Courage?

By Kyle Smith

Tuesday, April 26, 2022

 

‘Let me be very clear to all of you, and I have been very clear to the president: He bears responsibilities for his words and actions,” Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told House Republicans during a January 11 conference call. “No ifs, ands, or buts.”

 

If we also acknowledge that “everybody across the country bears some responsibility,” he clarified on January 24.

 

And we must remember the response “four years ago after President Trump was sworn in,” McCarthy added in the same interview. “What happened in the very next day? The title was ‘resist,’ with people walking in the streets, Maxine Waters saying to confront people, confront them in the restaurants.”

 

But anyway, Republicans picked up seats in the House in 2020, so there.

 

McCarthy was right on January 11, wrong when he started cowering, then wrong again when he unwisely denied last week that he’d said he would tell Trump, “It would be my recommendation you should resign.”

 

The Republican Party today faces a disquieting problem: Donald Trump could run for president again. And blow it again. If Trump had made even one fewer egregious mistake — such as not acting like a cranially damaged berserker on meth in the first debate against Joe Biden — he might well have been reelected, and we would have been spared the spectacularly awful rule of the Democratic Party.

 

Trump also cost the Republicans the Senate by making Georgia voters originally inclined to vote for his party suddenly feel that voting was meaningless in a system so cruelly rigged as to deny Trump continued residence in the Oval Office. A Trump candidacy in 2024 would be exhausting, dispiriting, and maddening. The entire party would be at the mercy of a creaky 78-year-old agent of chaos who already managed to lose to a guy who spent the 2020 campaign hiding in his basement.

 

Courage could have steered us away from this prospect, if every Republican who understood that Donald Trump had at last done something truly unforgivable had had the intestinal fortitude to vote accordingly.

 

Convicting Trump in the second impeachment, and barring him from ever holding the office of president again, would have been morally sound and politically wise. After a few months of grumbling, Republican Trump fans would have been forced to concede that it was time to get back to the chief business of the Republican Party, which is not to kiss the feet of Donald Trump but to stop Democrats from enacting their terrible ideas. Grudgingly, they would have conceded that Trump is now of the past, not the future.

 

Instead, all but seven Republican senators cringed and shrank and wondered, “Will Trump say something mean about me if I do the right thing?” They pulled a Kevin McCarthy.

 

Honesty is important in a politician, but honesty is born of courage. Where was McCarthy’s courage? Where is anyone’s? We know the Democrats lack the courage to speak the truth on virtually anything, from crime to gender identity to inflation. Republicans of today are not exactly the cast of Braveheart either, but just a temporary spike in courage last January could have saved the party a grueling series of headaches in the future.

 

Barring Trump from returning to the White House would have required just ten additional Republican votes in the Senate. Yet Mitch McConnell voted nay even though he had just been reelected, and won’t have to face voters again until 2026, when he’ll be 84. “The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a b**** for us,” McConnell said of Trump, relying on questionable math, days after the riot. He added, “If this isn’t impeachable, I don’t know what is.” He did an about-face when he realized Trump was going to be acquitted.

 

Many other Republican senators had also just been reelected and hence had every reason to feel secure. The whole point of six-year terms is to encourage senators to think about the long run — to lend them some courage. Yet almost every member of the group of senators that won’t face voters again until 2026 — Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Steve Daines of Montana, Jim Risch of Idaho, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, Mike Rounds of South Dakota, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, John Cornyn of Texas, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, and Roger Marshall of Kansas — misplaced their fortitude, along with Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who had just been reelected and who said of Trump on the Senate floor on the night of January 6, “All I can say is enough is enough, count me out.” Oklahoma’s Jim Inhofe voted nay even though he had just been reelected and would announce his retirement six months later.

 

All of these votes to preserve Trump’s fragile ego and safeguard his political future came just five weeks after these senators were personally imperiled, and their place of deliberation done $1.5 million worth of damage, by the mob Trump unleashed with his inane and factually challenged rhetoric. Only Ben Sasse (Nebraska), Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Richard Burr (North Carolina), Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania), Bill Cassidy (Tennessee), and Mitt Romney (Utah) voted to convict Trump of his shameful role in the attack on the Capitol.

 

The prospect of Joe Biden — or, worse, Kamala Harris — being reelected in two years’ time is revolting, and yet it’s a strong possibility thanks to these and other senators’ lack of courage. And if Trump should run again and win, what then? Presiding into his eighties, he’s certain to be even less disciplined, less effective, and less able to attract talented public servants than he was in his unruly first term.

 

Possession of a spinal column is not listed in the Constitution as a prerequisite for senatorial consideration, but it ought to be. As it is, we can blame the Republican invertebrate caucus for prolonging a period of Trumpian turmoil.